Overwhelmed Recipients

On the twelfth day of Listmas, my data showed to me overwhelmed recipients…

Just about everything on our list from the 12 Days of Listmas has one result: Recipients are overwhelmed. According to The Radicati Group, Inc.’s Email Statistics Report, 2017-2021 the “average” email address should anticipate receiving 72 pieces of email per day in 2017. Now, that doesn’t sound like much until you remember that many people have two email accounts (one for personal use and one for business).

Since both the number of accounts and the number of messages includes business and personal accounts, that would mean that the average user should anticipate getting 144 emails per day. Many of those emails will be marketing emails. And, as it happens, send rates for marketing emails go up at the end of the year. So, that will skew those numbers a bit lower in January through October and higher in November and December.

In a telling 2015 blog post, Layla Thomas points out that there seems to be an inverse relationship between send rates and open rates in the last quarter of the year:

Source: Listrak

The blog post points out the most likely reason for this: As seasonal sending hits its highwater mark, the consumers that the messages are aimed at have the least amount of free time. The result: overwhelmed recipients. And overwhelmed recipients tend to be less forgiving of missteps in areas like overmailing or the repurposing of data.

And there you have it. We’ve had “12 days of Listmas.” I hope that these posts have been as fun and informative for you to read as they’ve been fun for me to write.